Tableau Conference Update

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Last week InfoSol headed to the Mandalay Bay conference center, Las Vegas for the annual Tableau Conference. I was fortunate to attend as a representative of the InfoSol UK development team. About 18 months ago we started the development of the IBTab add-on. This InfoBurst add-on provides a way for companies to take their Business Objects Web Intelligence reports and use them as a source to a Tableau visualization or dashboard. Companies have a huge investment in their existing Business Objects deployment and IBTab allows them to leverage this investment providing a consistent and trusted source of data for Tableau. IBTab was InfoSol's first step on the Tableau journey, and it's a journey I'm excited to see where it goes.

About two weeks ago we released InfoBurst build 233 which included the Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC). The WDC gives you the ability to connect Tableau directly to your InfoBurst platform and consume database queries, and access the XDC (InfoSol's high performance data cache).

Keynotes - TC17

At the conference there were a number of technical tracks showcasing new and upcoming API's and functionality. in the 6 months since I first started developing the WDC there have been a number of improvements to this aspect of Tableau, so keep your eyes out for version 2 of the Web Data Connector coming soon. There have also been a host of features added to the Server API allowing for a more integrated and streamlined experience between IBTab and Tableau Server, which we will be exploring in the coming months.

Hyper brings faster data refreshes and query performance to Tableau extracts. It is designed to be lightning fast and to handle exceptionally large data sets in the 10's of millions , 100's of millions or even billions of rows. The UK dev team is already well into the Hyper journey and will be bringing Export to Hyper for InfoBurst very soon.

The Extraction API opens up the "black box" of Tableau to developers and allows for the creation of add-ons and extensions to the desktop tool. This is probably the announcement I was most looking forwards to, this API will allow us to create new and exciting components as well as port some of our existing Xcelsius or Web Intelligence capabilities to Tableau. Features such as database write-back, which enables you to turn a BI Dashboard into a more fully functional BI application. Work with the Extraction API has started and I look forward to showcasing some of our add-ons and components in the near future.

The Tableau Conference 2017 was a great event, and I can't wait until TC18 to give us the opportunity to showcase our Tableau Extensions, and to see what new things Tableau will announce too.